Issac G's Blog

So I was checking out @timlinden’s blog where he was asking his followers what they thought of 2009, advertising wise, and saw something which I’d been waiting to see for quite a bit, although most of it was in the form of “Yeah, what she said…”.

People seem to want a better reason to sign up for your list than to get a free download.

That’s cool with me, as I’ve already got something like that going with Insta!Login – now all I’ve got to do is monetize it

On the subject, I’m still waiting for more people to fill out my end-of-2009 survey, but there are some interesting findings already and once I get a slightly more significant sample of answers, I’ll be sharing what I find, so fill yours out if you haven’t yet so I can get the answers out ASAP!

So there’s a brand new product called Viral Mail Profits which is going to launch really soon (as of writing, at least ) that I was invited to review by the admins, both of whom are really talented and good friends besides.  I’m not going to talk about why you should or shouldn’t sign up and/or upgrade. I frankly don’t even know what the pricing structure is yet!  Instead, I want to talk a bit about my experience in reviewing it.

At first, I thought that it was just a clone of Traffic Zipper.  For those who aren’t familiar, Traffic Zipper is a service that Mike Purvis provides which will automatically log you into your favorite safelists and send your messages for you.  I really didn’t like it for a bunch of reasons.  The big 3 were

1. The fact that on credit-based safelists I couldn’t see how many members I could email.  That could possibly translate into a waste of credits, or worse: under-sending to less members than I potentially could.
2. The fact that on safelists with separate text/html mails, I couldn’t customize the different options.  That’s also really important to me, since in HTML mails that contain tracking links, it’s important for me for the clickable link to not be a URL.  The reason for that is that the latter might trigger phishing-detecting programs, meaning lower penetration rates for my email.
3. The fact that I was limited to a preset list of programs, which didn’t include several programs that I regularly use

When I initially logged in to Viral Mail Profits, it looked exactly the same as Traffic Zipper.   Except for one teeny tiny detail: the one feature that I really kinda liked about Traffic Zipper – the fact that it would do the hard work for me – wasn’t even there!  What?!?

But as I explored, I found that there were a bunch of features which were much cooler.

First of all, there’s a built in link tracking on a per-link basis.  Basically, the way the system works, you prepare your email messages and list of safelists in advance, just like Mike’s program.  But at Viral Mail Profits, instead of it sending the mail for you, it just formats the message (including the first-name tags and other per-safelist specifics) and gives you the exact mail to copy/paste into the safelist you want to send from.  Like I said, this initially seemed like an annoyance.  More work for me.

Oon the other hand, it meant that I’d be keeping up-to-date on these safelists by logging in each time, and seeing how my account is doing, and maybe if there are any special offers available.

Anyway, I was saying that the link tracker was also included in the emails that Viral Mail Profits prepared automatically for you.  That’s amazing! It  means that the average use  can start tracking their safelist mailing results without doing anything that they are not already doing!  That’s a massive feature AND time saver right off the top.

At first I was a bit negative about that feature.  I do my own custom tracking, and this didn’t seem to be a useful feature.  Later on, though,  I considered that I could put this on top of my personal tracking, and still benefit from seeing which versions of the email copy performed better or worse across ALL of the safelists.  That’s something which ha’s been difficult for me to do on my own.

At that point, I already knew that even for a pro like myself, this was going to be a useful tool!

But it got better.

There were also custom programs that I could add to the list and track without the system needing to “support” the safelists that I personally use.  That’s also a huge plus.

Finally, the cherry on top was the ad reminder system, that will email me every day that I can send a new email out and get it out on time, so as not to miss out on advertising that I’m paying (or clicking) for!

There are some extra built-in features too, but there really are so many that I can’t possibly cover them all here.  But I’m expecting to see a 250% increase in my safelist-generated profits really quickly.  We’ll see how it performs, but I’m pretty hyped over Viral Mail Profits!

Your list is your most valuable asset in the online world.  Period.

Your list isn’t necessarily a bunch of email addresses, although it commonly is.

Your list may be your Twitter followers, your Facebook fans, your “crew” at your favorite forum.

Really, the generic network marketing description of your “luke-warm list” is the best:  A group of people over whom you have influence.  Every single thing you do in online marketing should be focused around expanding that circle on a constant basis.  That’s why social media marketing is so powerful – because it works perfectly alongside this principle.

One of the classic methods of doing so are with squeeze pages.  If you’ve read my book, then you know that a squeeze page is just like a splash page but also has a lead capture form.  Classically, you’ll have some offer on the page as “bait” to get people to sign up.  I often offer my book.

But it’s also really important to think about what to do after you have them on your list.

Some people do nothing, which is a mistake, because the next time you send them an email, they’ll have already forgotten who you are and why they were ever interested in you, and may just unsubscribe.

Some people set up a massive autoresponder full of canned messages and send them over the course of a month.  That’s how I personally started, and while it’s not optimal, it’s MUCH better than doing nothing.  I built my list to 2,000 members and made $500 a month from an autoresponder that was based on canned mails which I lightly editted to make them sound more like me.

Not bad, eh?

Now, after several years in the business, I’m applying a lot of what I’ve learned and redoing my list from scratch.  All my own content.  Using new copy.  And new information that’s up to date for 2010.

And I’m not focusing only on one list.  I have several lists.  One for each “niche” of people that my various signup forms might interest.

That way, I can pick the users whom I want to market a new product to, and I’ll have a better chance of making sales.  Because the email will be better targeted.

Building your list, learning to talk with them, and earn their respect (remember that your goal is for them to enter your circle of influence!) and willingness to hear a bout new products from you is not an easy task nor a short one.

It takes time to build a quality list.  You need to select your target market up front.  You need to get them on the list.  You need to follow-up with them to keep them interested in you and what you have to say.

Only then will you find it easy to sell to them.

The bad news is that I can’t offer you a product to make this easier.  It’s really more your own discipline than any tool to make it work.

Try.  Track.  Learn from your results.  That’s the only way to do it.

If you’ve already read my book, Leveraging Traffic Exchanges for MAX Results, you’ll have learned about the proper types of pages to promote at traffic exchanges.

Over the course of Chapter 5, I go into a very long explanation of Splash Pages and Squeeze Pages.  I cover important ideas like self-branding, using sound and video to capture your visitors’ eyes, and how to organize your splash pages for best results.

I won’t bore you by repeating it all here.  Go read the book.

Instead, I’m going to talk about what other pages you might want to rotate in a traffic exchange.

The truth is that sometimes, under the right conditions, it does make sense to promote a page which is neither a splash page nor a squeeze page.

One example of another page to rotate is a generic sales page which you add your own list signup form to.  Whether the page supports it out of  the box on its own (which is very rare!), or you use a third party service like Phantom Link Cloaker (which I highly recommend) or WidgetQUIK (which is a less powerful service but offers the same feature) to “hijack” the sales page to add your own mailing list signup, this is a really trivial thing to do these days, and doesn’t take much time.

By doing this, you’re ensuring your own long-term success as a result of sending traffic to the page, rather than hanging all of your hopes on someone else’s page, and not even getting the contact details of the prospect in any case (at best, you’ll receive a commission on the sale – and yes, this is in parenthesis as a side point for a reason!).

But by “hijacking” the page to include your own picture, or contact form, or something else personal, you’re ensuring that you get a personal return on the promotion, even if there is no sale; and if you put your picture on it, there’s personal branding even if there is no sale!  How cool is that?!?

While I don’t want to get in to long talk on just what qualifies a page as a good idea to rotate, and what doesn’t, the basic idea is that the page in rotation should be doing something for YOU that can earn you long-term income, regardless of the details of the page itself.

By focusing on you, rather than the specific product, service or site that your page is there to promote, you ensure yourself MUCH better results than 95% of surfers out there are getting.

One of the biggest problems that newbies in this industry encounter is their subconscious unwillingness to treat this as a business.

When I got started, I loved to surf.  The new exchanges were always cool and fresh, and gave me a very fun experience.  I would love the surf games, surf ratios, bonus prizes, and all of the extra goodies that sites offered.  But I never really thought about how to use those extra credits to really make a steady stream of credits on the sites that I surfed on a normal basis.

The result was that I never really got enough of a credit pool in any given exchange to really penetrate that exchange and improve my page’s results there from “pot luck” to something that has some statistical significance.

So I’d end up trying to promote all of these programs with just 50 credits here, 25 credits there, and then I’d get really upset when I didn’t get great results.   I was promoting other programs directly with their sales pages, too – convinced that their sales copy and design were better than anything that I could come up with on my own.

The truth is, looking back, that I was lucky indeed to get any results at all.  Because I was doing it so wrong.

Aside from the obvious (obvious if you’ve already read my book “Leveraging Traffic Exchanges for MAX Results”, anyway) mistake of using long sales pages instead of splash and squeeze pages better suited for use with traffic exchanges, I had a big problem in how I surfed the exchanges myself!

The problem was that I didn’t have a plan.  I was surfing odd hours, just for fun, and not really organizing how I spent or earned those credits.

It took me a long time to figure out that that was affecting my results so much, but once I did (and fixed the issue) my credit income boosted fy 70% almost overnight!

It was almost like magic.

But it really wasn’t magic at all.

It was just me managing my time better.  And surfing to improve my business; not just for the fun of it.  Today, I’d like to share with you one of the free tools that really helped me out in this particular area.  It’s called a surfing calculator, and it’s offered 100% free by a site called Surfing for Success.  You can check it out for yourself right here.

There are three calculators there.

The first lets you input the surf ratio and bonuses at your ten favorite exchanges along with your five favorite splash pages, and the amount of time that you plan to spend on your surf session, and it will help you figure out how many credits (impressions) of each splash page you’ll earn for each page at each exchange.  Really neat trick!

Then, there are another two advanced calculators which help you figure out an optimal surfing schedule – the first calculator is a daily one, and the second is a weekly.  You do need to pay a small upgrade fee to take advantage of the latter two calculators, but think of it as an investment in making your surfing much more productive – at least, that’s what I did.

I know that once I started using these tools, I found them to have a drastic effect on how I was spending (only now I was truly investing, rather than mostly wasting) my time surfing the exchanges.